Reddit-Approved Tips For Ordering A Pizza If You Have Phone Anxiety

In an age where most forms of communication take place in the digital world, human connection is at once abundant and obsolete. On one hand, we can send instantaneous text messages to far-away loved ones instead of relying on the postal service; we can play video games with strangers on the other side of the world; we can tag celebrities, presidents, and prime ministers on Twitter. On the other hand, as things like grocery delivery apps become more ubiquitous, tasks that once required leaving the house can now be accomplished with a few taps on a smartphone — no small-talk required.

But what happens when the best pizza spot in town doesn't have a portal for online orders? According to the creator of a Reddit post that received over nine thousand upvotes, a simple phone call can cause a lot of stress for those who have grown used to automated or digital exchanges.

The post reads, "Have you experienced phone anxiety, where you get extremely nervous and embarrassed when answering/making a phone call, even when it's something as simple as ordering a pizza? If so, how do you deal with it?" A few recurring answers in the post's 1.5K comments stand out among the rest, and they also serve to normalize this uniquely 21st-century problem.

The term exposure therapy might elicit images of arachnophobes sitting in a room full of spiders, but the method applies to all sorts of fears and anxieties. While it might sound scary to those who dread using their phone in its original interface, Redditors claim that facing the problem head-on works wonders. One commenter writes, "I tell myself that I'm going to keep feeling stressed and anxious until the call is over, so the best way to minimize that is to do the call soon rather than spend hours (or days) putting it off and constantly having it on my mind." Another commenter took the method acting approach by taking a job at a pizza shop. "Once I realized I was kinda playing a character (pizza phone guy) and could hide behind that, I was fine, and that spilled over to other calls." 

Speaking of acting, many commenters also suggest writing an easy-to-follow outline before making a call. "I script my first line and write what I am calling about in simple words with big letters," writes one user. "I do this, too!" echoes another, adding, "It helps a lot when doing phone interviews so I don't trip over my words."

When in doubt, it never hurts to invoke the Roman poet Horace with the Latin phrase "sedit qui timuit ne non succederet": "They who feared they would not succeed sat still," or, in this case, never got to enjoy a delicious pizza.